This Matters

I took sev­eral of these seri­ous mod­els with non-model peo­ple walk­ing by. Then I decided that the empti­ness of the walk­way said most of what I wanted – even though there is a cou­ple com­ing out of the van­ish­ing point. I can’t say I don’t like the world of fash­ion and exor­bi­tant beauty, even though I know that the for­lorn pseudo-dismay of these mod­els is best described by empti­ness. It is van­ity: theirs and mine. Maybe I just like sparkly things, maybe I have a part that is still hooked by the dream of it all. Does this kind of beauty really does stop at the skin? The design­ers tell sim­i­lar sto­ries over and over again and peo­ple (me too!) lap them up with the fer­vor of soap-opera addicted not-so-busy-bodies. How many ways can we see LV or Gucci stir­rups? How many ways can a dead head hear Sugar Mag­no­lia. We seem to be join­ers, we humans, we want to belong. We find dis­tinc­tion in our areas of sim­i­lar­ity. ”I am dif­fer­ent from you” because I have this hand bag (that one mil­lion other peo­ple have) or this cam­era or because I get this music that only one mil­lion other peo­ple get, but not you.

This store is part of a really amaz­ing piece of archi­tec­ture in Vegas. All the stores are as expen­sive as pos­si­ble, of course. The lines of it look like the archi­tect attached a pen­cil to a slinky and made a build­ing out of a play session.